You’re going to get your hands dirty
A good farmer scoops up the soil in their hand and smells the earth, perhaps even taste the earth. The thing is that as a farmer you will be getting intimate with your market.

If the crop you plan to raise is made up of web users then your web page is the soil that they will grow strong on. The nutrients you add to your web page have a fragrance, maybe even a certain taste. And the richest addition you can add to your web page is your own personality.

Now, don’t get fearful
Perhaps professional marketers have told you not to get personal with your marketing, but that type of aggressive marketing is not what we are talking about here. To cultivate your market you need to talk to them in ways that nurture, and this means that you care enough to be yourself.

If you wanted to get to know someone based on a feeling of attraction would you analyze how to do this? If you overheard a conversation and the opinions expressed attracted you would you choose to get demographics and contact information before you introduce yourself?

The whole purpose of cultivating a market lends itself to casual and intimate conversations. And ‘intimate’ does not mean private and secretive, it means:

Marked by close acquaintance, association, or familiarity

Relating to or indicative of one’s deepest nature

Most web marketing is done at arm’s length because the marketing people are not clear on the market being targeted. And the word ‘targeted’ is rather cold and disconnected emotionally. Targeting is an odd way to build relationships, but building relationships is exactly what we want to do.

Cultivating the market
The bigger portion of our market that we wish to cultivate is at earlier stages of the buying cycle and we are able to help them and build a relationship in the process. In this way we cultivate a much bigger market than trying to capture the smaller numbers that are ready to purchase.

Those members of our market that are ready to purchase have already been influenced. We cannot reach many of them now. On the other hand, the greater numbers that are early in their search can be cultivated, influenced and helped to make a smart choice and buy from us.

We need to design a web site that will allow us to be helpful and generous in sharing our information. Far too many small business web owners do not know what to share with their market. We are going to be different.

What do we feed our market?
We want our undecided market to choose our solution as their purchase. To do that we need to help them along, and this is where our web design comes into play.

Our page is jammed full of really good information but it doesn’t show everything at once. And then there are other pages doing the same thing. We are using HTML which stands for Hyper Text Markup Language. It is the hyper text that allows us to provide a selection and then deliver a choice.

We are no longer using limited space on paper, nor are we using limited time on TV. Web marketing needs to use HTML in its marketing to get the most out of the medium and yet the HTML in contemporary business designs is relegated to basic navigation and placeholders for content. Instead, we need to put HTML into our marketing methods and provide choices for all members of our market.

Talking all the way through
We will spend time talking to that portion of our market that doesn’t even recognize yet that they have a problem. We are going to help educate them so that they do recognize that their life could be better with our solutions.

We will spend time talking with those that are researching possible solutions and we will help them see all of their possibilities from all sides. We’ll look at the upside and the downside of various features. We’ll bring these people along our path of understanding so that they are ready to look at comparisons.

We will not be afraid to compare our solution with others available on the market. We want to nurture this stage of the buying cycle fearlessly and give them all of the choices available while building a relationship they can trust. We want to keep this stage engaged or they will leave our site looking for comparable products and solutions.

If we don’t feed them right now and right here their next stage of development is to make a decision to purchase and we could lose them at a crucial moment in the cycle.

Farmer or hunter
A hunter fears that the prey will get away. They target and shoot early when they can and short term goals are everything to a hunter. On the other hand a farmer has long term goals and works with the seasons. Six months can go by from planting to harvesting and a farmer knows that nurturing cannot be superficial or provided with impatience.

Our harvest will arrive and it will be our own if we provide the helpful nutrients. Spending time to create the best content is essential and the easiest way for our market to find the right content on our site is also essential. But it can all be for naught if we choke up at the end and impatiently push for the sale.

We need to honor our market and validate their choice even when the choice goes to our competitor. Most choices will come our way because we nurtured that market along and we have build up a relationship. All the rest will take care of itself. It does so because everything about the marketing process is as natural as sunlight and rain.

Pull Marketing
And when we market naturally we are attracting the best interest from search engines. We are providing volumes of our unique and original information that search engines and our market are attracted to. We are sharing information that creates growth while building relationships with our market. We are cultivating our market by solving problems and providing insight for our market. And the bulk of our information is work that does not have to be repeated over and over.

Our web pages may need some tweaking from time to time but our main effort is going to last for a long time to come. And perhaps one of the most valuable assets we develop with pull marketing is that nothing we ever do is lost. All of our marketing stays in place for years and as we build we grow stronger and stronger.

Unlike push marketing that requires constant feeding of cash for advertising, our pull marketing is more like putting money in the bank and building our reserves instead of spending them.

Farming our web market is a very different concept from that of an opportunist feeding off of the market. By farming we control our own market and build a richer relationship rather than rely on just the good seasons or good years to get us through.

Usually performed by specialized programmers, it can be varied or specific, depending on the Web pages requirements. It is necessary for the programmers to be familiar with the specific coding, which includes HTML, XML, CSS, ASP, LSP, Flash, Perl, and others.

Recent adoption of portable devices has increased the demand for web applications. It is construed that new applications’ demand is outstripping the supply. Perhaps the answer lies with RAD (Rapid Application Development, also referred as Rapid Prototyping) tools. RAD tools use automated design and coding which can replace manual coding processes hence could bring new tools and processes to change the fundamentals of applications building.

Automation speeds Web application development by eliminating methodologies that are dependent on the skills of certain individuals. It expedites the application development to improve agility, which is important for web and desktop applications. RAD enables visualization of the end design 20% quicker than conventional software development.

A Web application development company can utilize the Spiral method by using modern RAD tools. Spiral development breaks a project into simpler pieces that can be developed concurrently. Independent testing of each part can be undertaken before wrapping them altogether to complete the project. RAD with spiral development cut the required time to develop applications by increasing flexibility.

The recent shift from desktop to web applications created a new set of tools and methodologies for development. Those newer tools deliver applications through the web via AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML). AJAX is a set of technologies allowing developers to web-enable applications and run them in a web browser.

For most developers, the initial step for moving applications to the web is selecting a development suite incorporating RAD capabilities. A suitable RAD environment should be able to do the following:

” Incorporate methodologies for web-enabled applications

” Interact with databases

” Feature an IDE (Integrated Development Environment)

RAD provides the Web application development process credibility by facilitating customers to provide inputs via a portal. It can serve as a feasibility study from the developer’s point of view. By integrating customers to participate, the developer can obtain data on how the process performs with satisfactory results.

Another key element of RAD was visual programming for a Web application development company. According to its concept, there is a possibility to construct a software with little or no programming knowledge. It further explains that by hooking to a kind of workshop-like development application, non-programmers can create programs. However, this ideal has never been fulfilled though visual development procedures became a part of the programmer’s toolkit.

So, you’ve finally decided that you need a web site for your business? Well, there are a few key-points to remember BEFORE you make one of the most crucial decisions for your business.

Choosing the right designer for your new business web site:

When it comes to choosing the right web designer for your web site, you should always shop around first to check out all of the available options. There are many web design companies out there to choose from. And most of them are pretty good at what they do.

Always ask to see samples of a web designer’s previous work and examine their portfolio. This will help you get a better feel for the style of sites any particular web designer is capable of doing. Most of the time, web designers have their own unique style and you can easily spot which designs they’ve done in the past. I mean, it’s similar to any other artist’s style; you can definitely spot their previous works based on the general layout, color scheme, and over-all visual appearance of the sites.

Experience is also a key factor here. Just like any other craft, web designers get better with experience. So naturally, you’ll be better off by choosing a web designer who has more experience under his or her belt.

Another key point you should define is whether or not the web designer can make you a 100% custom web site. Or will it be just a basic template web design that 100’s or even 1,000’s of people already have across the Internet. Pretty much anybody these days can create a basic HTML web page in Microsoft Word or Publisher and change the title of it to reflect their Branson business. But you must ask yourself: “is this really what I’m looking for”?

Web sites that are truly custom built will stand out more the rest of the basic template web designs that so many people are using these days. A custom web design will catch the eye of your potential customers and show them that you have a really professional web presence and you mean business.

A lot of web designers these days choose to do the template web sites for one of 2 reasons:

It’s cheaper to use a basic template web design. They might be lacking the necessary skills needed to develop a fully custom web site. Whatever the case may be, make sure you go with a designer who is capable of creating a custom web design for you. It will inevitably cost you more for a custom site. But it is totally worth the extra money spent. Trust me, in the end you will be much happier with your web site if it is a site that’s unique and created for just your business and not everybody else’s.

Communication with a potential web designer is also critical in the development of your web site. You need to be perfectly clear and define your goals up-front, before you actually sign a web design service contract with a designer. Make sure you know what you are getting for your money and make sure you get it in writing! I have a 9-page web site design contract that I use every single time I design a new web site. Included in this contract is an itemized list of all work that is to be performed during the development of the web site. Things like the exact number of pages, the exact number of graphics to be designed, whether or not I need to create a logo, the estimated time before completion, whether or not routine site maintenance will be performed after the site is 6 months or 1 year old, etc.

Defining these things will help you in the long run and will also make sure you and the web designer are on the same page.

I also use what I call my “web design planning worksheet”. This worksheet gives “milestones” or deadlines for each phase of the web design project. Things like “In 2 weeks the general layout will be done” and “2 weeks after that, the site will be coded and launched” and then “In one moth after the web site is launched, we will evaluate it to see what needs to be adjusted”, etc. (these are just examples, by the way. the details included in one of my actual worksheets gives exact dates and more specific milestones).

And what about the web hosting for your new web site? Usually, a web designer will provide some kind of insight as to which hosting company they recommend. Web designers in general have a preference for a hosting company that they know will be a good choice for your web site and they should assist you in making this selection.

Fortunately, we have our own web server here at Digital Spiral Web Design so we can do all of the hosting ourselves. This is very beneficial because we can make sure the web server stays up and running and if there is any maintenance that needs to be performed on the server, we can do it ourselves in a timely manner. Plus, we will always cut a deal for our web site hosting services to any new business who chooses us to do their web design.

Will your new web site require any specialized web programming? Well, the answer to that question is based solely on the needs of your Branson web site. What kind of site will it be? Does it need a shopping cart for e-commerce? Will you be implementing any special web applications or online forms for your viewers to fill out? Will it be a web site that requires your viewers to fill out registrations and sign up so they can login? If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, then chances are you’ll need a web designer who can also program.

Web developers and designers must be skilled in the art of web PROGRAMMING (something that is very different from regular web DESIGN). Web programming involves the implementation of different web programming languages like JAVA, PHP, Flash, SQL, or.NET. All of these web programming languages need highly skilled individuals to code them and develop web programs with them.

I personally love PHP! I use it for pretty much everything. I won’t go into the details of PHP in this article (I would have to write an entire book about it to cover all of it). But with PHP, I can create pretty much any web application that is logically possible.

So, make sure you choose a web designer who is also capable of coding any special functions that your new web site needs. This decision needs to be discussed and gone over by any potential web designer you might use to create your Branson web site.

And finally, you should always check with the potential web designer’s previous clients to make sure they give him or her a good reference. Remember: it just like any other service. You need to verify a web designer’s references and make sure they can do what they say they can do.

So, just to summarize all of the tips I’ve mentioned:

Ask questions, questions, and more questions before you choose a web designer. Clearly define your goals from the beginning. Ask to see the web designer’s portfolio and samples of their previous work. Make sure they can help you with choosing a web hosting provider. Get documentation to show exactly how many pages will be included in the project and the estimated time before completion. If your Branson web site requires special web programming, make sure the designer can handle it. I hope this article helps anybody who is getting ready to have a new web site designed. A good web site can really do wonders for your business!

Here at Branson website design, we specialize in affordable custom web design for all businesses! We also offer very affordable pricing for our web hosting services. If you would like to know more about our services or to see our web design portfolio, visit our main company web site at the link below. We offer affordable custom web designs!

Search Engine Optimization is a strategy that helps businesses enjoy better visibility. Visibility is very important since it makes it possible for the business to reach out to the right people with the right message for the right reactions. It increases the ranking of the business website on search engines to attract and also retain visitors for the sake of the business. The retention increases sales conversion possibilities and this is good for business. It also creates the potential for repeat customers, valuable for any businesses.

SEO is part of web marketing, but many other strategies can also be employed to make the marketing as rewarding as it should be. Internet users use search engines to find what they want and any business with a strong online presence is becoming easy to notice. It is important to remember that most of the users will never get past the first page of search results and to be easily noticed, your business has to make it to the highest possible ranking on the results. Those who continue looking without changing the search keyword will go probably up to the third page then make a change.

In as much as social media has taken over in marketing, web marketing still enjoys a huge chunk, especially from very serious customers who want to get all details to aid a purchase in a short period of time. Using SEO web marketing, you will notice an increase in traffic to your site. The strategy will also help in improving your brand credibility since most consumers trust the results that they get from the search engines such as Google. They consider the top information reliable and will easily trust your brand if you rank high.

The services

Web marketing services are handled differently to achieve the best results. The SEO companies will use keyword density, Meta tags and inbound links to make the marketing process easy and fruitful for your business. The content that is on the website also plays an important role in the success of web marketing hence making it important to remain relevant and interesting. You can enjoy content writing services to ensure that your website is good enough for all your visitors easily giving them the information they need to make a purchase. In most cases, you will need the help of professionals to get it right with your SEO web marketing strategy.

When looking for a good provider, consider the experience in SEO marketing as well as the services that your business can enjoy to enjoy all benefits that come with the strategy. A good provider should listen to all your business needs first before offering you the best solutions. If you are completely lost when it comes to this kind of marketing, your provider should be able to offer you helpful advice to get the very best from the efforts that you direct to improve your online presence for the business. Sometimes, a few changes are all what you need to get your brand out there.